This site is thus supported not only by the mediaeval tradition, but by the early tradition as well. The Bordeaux pilgrim, who visited Jeru- salem in A.D. 333, after mentioning two large fish- pools by the side of the temple, one at the right hand, the other at the left, says in another place {Itin. Hierosol. 589) : ' But farther in the city are twin fish-pools having five porches which are called Bethsaida. There the sicK of many years were wont to be healed. But these pools have water which, when agitated, is of a kind of red colour.' This is evidently the same place described by Eusebius (Onomasticon, 240. 15) in the same cen- tury and called by him Bezatha, though he gives no other clue to the situation — 'a pool at Jeru- salem, which is the Piscina Prohatica, and had formerly five porches, and now is pointed out at the twin pools there, of which one is filled by the rains of the year, but the other exhibits its water tinged in an extraordinary manner with red, re- taining a trace, they say, of the victims that were formerly cleansed in it.' Clearly, too, it is of the same place that Eucherius speaks in the 5th cent. : ' Bethsaida, peculiar for being a double lake, of which one pool is for the most part filled by winter rains, the other is discoloured by reddish waters.' It has been commonly assumed of late that the two tunnels under the convent of the Sisters of Zion are the twin pools mentioned by these writers ; but the traditions of the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, to be presently quoted, place the pool with the five porches and the church called Probatica (cf. x/jo/Sotikb, Jn 5=) at or near the traditional birthplace of Mary, which is un- doubtedly under the present Church of St. Anne. Thus Antoninus Martyr (A.D. 570) says : ' Return- ing into the city we come to the Piscina Natatoria, which has five porches ; and in one of these is the basilica of St. Mary, in which many miraculous cures are wrought.' Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem (A.D. 632), says : ' I will enter the holy Probatica, where the illustrious Anna brought forth Mary.' John of Damascus (about A.D. '750) says : ' May all things be propitious to thee, O
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Probatica, the most holy temple of the Mother of God ! May all things be propitious to thee, O Probatica, ancestral domicile of a queen ! May all things be propitious to thee, O Probatica, formerly the fold of Joachim's flocks, but now a church, heaven-resembling, of the rational flock of Christ ! ' Brocardus also speaks (A.D. 1283) of a large reser- voir near St. Anne's Church, called Piscina Interior, just opposite Birkat Jsrail.
Early tradition, therefore, as well as mediaeval, seems to favour the site discovered in 1888. This is the site now generally accepted, though some recent writers are still unconvinced, such as Sanday (Sacred Sites of the Gospels, 55), who rejects Schick's identification but reaches no positive conclusion of his own, and Conder (Hastings' DB, article 'Bethesda'), who argues for the Virgin's Pool. The intermittent troubling of the water at the Fountain of the Virgin is, indeed, a point in its favour; but this phenomenon is not uncommon in the springs of Palestine (Thomson, Land and
and, while nothing of the kind is now seen at the pool under the Crusaders' church, it is not, perhaps, a too violent supposition that the same intermit- tence now observed in the Virgin's Fountain may have characterized this pool also in that early time of more copious 'rains of the year,' as Eusebius calls them, especially if, as some think, they both lie upon the same concealed watercourse.
The last clause of Jn 5^ and the whole of v.*, containing the account of the troubling of the water by an angel and the miraculous healing that followed, are relegated to the margin in RV, on the ground of their omission by the ancient ra.anu- scripts NBD, and the exceptional number of vari- ants in the otlier MSS. Popular superstition seems to have attributed the periodic bubbling of the water to the action of an invisible angel. These passages were probably at first written on the margin as an expression of that opinion, and
later were introduced into the body of the text. W. W. Moore. BETHLEHEM.— Two towns of this name are mentioned in the Old Testament. 1. Bethlehem (DnS n'3 'house of bread') of Zebulun, Jos 19'^ The site is now occupied by a miserable village, 6 miles south-west of Sepphoris and about the same distance northwest of Nazareth, in a well-wooded district of country, planted with oaks (Robinson, Biblical Researches, iii. 113). That this Beth- lehem cannot have been the scene of the Nativity, near as it is to Nazareth, is dear from the fact that both St. Matthew and St. Luke expressly place the birth of Christ at Bethlehem of Judaea. These narratives beinjj independent of each other and derived from dilterent sources, we have for the southern Bethlehem the convergence of two distinct traditions. These two Evangelists are
i'oined in their testimony by the author of the i'ourth Gospel, who assumes acquaintance on the part of his readers with the story of the birth of Christ at Bethlehem, the Bethlehem associated with David and his royal line. ' Some said. Shall Christ come out of Galilee ? Hath not the Scrip- ture said that Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem where David was?' (Jn 7^'-«)- It is noteworthy that Beth- lehem is never mentioned as having been visited by our Lord or in any way associated with His ministry. But all Christian history and tradition maintain that the southern Bethlehem was the scene of the Nativity.